Integrating Systems with Customized Business Objects
by Dave Hollander
Why can't Joe identify his company's 10 best customers? The IT analyst had data from the CRM system in sales and the ERP system in manufacturing. But without additional data from support, accounting, and legal, the answers were incomplete.
In the illustration, standardized business objects have been used to move data between applications, but that accomplishes only exchanging them among similar silos—collections of applications that serve a specific business function. All of the ERP systems may be integrated together, but can an analyst integrate that data with data from support, legal, and financial ledgers? Many of today's IT challenges require collecting data from sources that have eluded IT integration. EAI, SOA, and Web services make it possible to exchange messages with these systems, but the standardized business objects do not have the right data.
To deliver the right answers to a wide range of business questions, IT needs to be able to quickly create customized business objects that represent applications, legacy data, and industry and trading partner standards, and to share the definitions of these objects throughout the enterprise. IT analysts need a vocabulary management environment that acts as a virtual factory that provides the flexibility to quickly and efficiently define the objects that analysts can use to give business managers the answers they really need.
About the Author
Dave Hollander is chief technology officer for Contivo, a provider of automated data integration technology, and co-chair of the W3C Web Services Architecture and XML Schema Working Groups. Contact Dave at .
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